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A Trillion-Dollar Nuclear Weapon Modernization Is Unnecessary

Conventional military forces are more than sufficient to protect America and its allies’ security with only one exception. Nuclear forces are required to deter nuclear attacks on this country and the other nations to whom we are pledged to defend from nuclear attack.

We should cut back on those plans and use the funds to ensure that our conventional forces maintain their superiority.

But what is required for deterrence? One hundred nuclear weapons could kill hundreds of millions of people in any nation. The close to 2,000 weapons now in the U.S. nuclear inventory would obliterate any adversary, and most of the world, as well. Still, like all of us, weapons age and require replacement parts. The question is how fast and to what extent we should replace existing nuclear forces.

President Obama has authorized a nuclear modernization program that would cost $1 trillion, that’s a “T,” over the next 30 years. This is unnecessary. Moreover, it will impose an increasing burden on the defense budget, making it difficult to maintain our conventional military superiority – the real guarantee of U.S. security. The next president should cut back nuclear modernization plans and use those funds to ensure that our more important conventional forces maintain their technological and quantitative superiority over all potential foes.

The cuts should include:

• Reducing the planned 12-boat fleet of strategic submarines to ten and retiring the oldest existing submarines immediately, while delaying introduction of the new subs, thus savings billions of dollars in the 2020s.

• Reducing the force of land-based missiles from 420 to 300, and delaying the current Minuteman ICBM replacement by 10 years. The reduction in numbers of missile and modest expenditures on electronic modernization would keep Minuteman operational for 10 years beyond current plans, pushing out significant expenditures to the 2030's.

• Continuing plans to build a new strategic bomber, the B-21, with a high priority and, assuming it can be kept on schedule and cost, canceling plans to build a new strategic cruise missile to arm it.

• Taking tactical fighter aircraft off the nuclear mission and bringing home the remaining few U.S. tactical nuclear bombs from Europe, where they are vulnerable to terrorist attacks and other threats.

The U.S. armed forces are exceptionally capable, trained like no others, prepared, and highly equipped. We do not need large numbers of nuclear weapons; let’s not let a politically driven nuclear modernization program divert the resources we need to retain our essential conventional superiority.